Santa Maria - Anjos Swell Statistics, Winter: All Swell – Any Wind

The rose diagram illustrates the range of swells directed at Santa Maria - Anjos through a typical northern hemisphere winter. It is based on 8485 NWW3 model predictions since 2006 (values every 3 hours). The wave model does not forecast wind and surf right at the coastline so we have chosen the most applicable grid node based on what we know about Santa Maria - Anjos, and at Santa Maria - Anjos the best grid node is 14 km away (9 miles).

The rose diagram shows the distribution of swell sizes and directions, while the graph at the bottom shows the same thing but without direction information. Five colours show increasing wave sizes. The smallest swells, less than 0.5m (1.5 feet), high are coloured blue. These happened only 19% of the time. Green and yellow represent increasing swell sizes and red represents the largest swells, greater than >3m (>10ft). In both graphs, the area of any colour is proportional to how frequently that size swell happens.

The diagram suggests that the most common swell direction, shown by the longest spokes, was NW, whereas the the most common wind blows from the SW. Because the wave model grid is offshore, sometimes a strong offshore wind blows largest waves away from Santa Maria - Anjos and away from the coast. We lump these in with the no surf category of the bar chart. To avoid confusion we don't show these in the rose graph. Because wind determines whether or not waves are surfable at Santa Maria - Anjos, you can select a similar diagram that shows only the swells that were predicted to coincide with glassy or offshore wind conditions. Over an average northern hemisphere winter, swells large enough to cause good for surfing waves at Santa Maria - Anjos run for about 81% of the time.

IMPORTANT: Beta version feature! Swell heights are open water values from NWW3. There is no attempt to model near-shore effects. Coastal wave heights will generally be less, especially if the break does not have unobstructed exposure to the open ocean.